The DIY terror threat

The United States confronts a menace of its own making in Iraq and the only way out appears to be via the United Nations, writes Marian Wilkinson.

General John Abizaid arrived at the Pentagon two days after the horrific bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad. Standing shoulder to shoulder with the United States Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, Abizaid pronounced that Iraq was now "at the centre of the global war of terrorism".

The senior commander for all US forces in the region, Abizaid warned that terrorism was the "No.1 security threat" in Iraq and his forces were scrambling to come to grips with it. Terrorist cells were becoming firmly established in Baghdad, he said, having successfully moved from isolated strongholds in the north and west of the country.

Asked if these cells were Saddam Hussein loyalists, foreign jihadists from Syria and Saudi Arabia or the al-Qaeda-affiliated Ansar al-Islam, Abizaid agreed all were active. "It's not good for us when they get established in an urban area, as you can well appreciate," he said.

Jessica Stern, a Harvard University terrorist expert, put it more bluntly: "[The] bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad was the latest evidence that America has taken a country that was not a terrorist threat and turned it into one."

Less than three months ago, President George Bush, in a Top Gun performance, landed in a US Navy fighter jet on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln returning from the Iraq war, thanked the crew for their successful mission and declared major combat operations in Iraq over.

The same day, his vice-president, Dick Cheney, told a cheering audience in Washington: "A Iraqi government that is of the people, by the people and for the people will serve as a dramatic and an inspiring example to other nations in the Middle East."

A short time later, Bush released his much-heralded road map for peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

Today Iraq is rapidly becoming an inspiring example for terrorists throughout the Arab world who want to kill Americans and challenge the US occupation of an Arab Muslim country. A previously unknown group calling itself the "Armed Vanguards of a Second Muhammad Army" this week issued a statement to Al Arabiya satellite television claiming responsibility for the deadly attack on the UN headquarters in Baghdad that killed at least 23 people, including the respected head of mission, Sergio Vieira de Mello.

Within hours of the Baghdad blast, Bush's Middle East road map was also under threat when a suicide bomber blew up a Jerusalem bus packed with men, women and children, killing 20. The attack, claimed by Hamas, marked the end of the fragile ceasefire, beginning another cycle of violence as the Israeli army retaliated by assassinating one of the founders of Hamas.

FOR nearly two years since the September 11, 2001 attacks, Bush has won the overwhelming support from the majority of Americans for his handling of national security. Backed by this support, he launched the pre-emptive war in Iraq in the face of opposition from the UN Security Council and the Arab world.

Now, both at home and abroad, the Bush Doctrine is under fire, fuelled by the growing security crisis in postwar Iraq. Both Democrats and Republicans in Congress are calling for hearings on the security crisis in Iraq and the failure of the White House to build more international support to help steer Iraq towards self-government.

Two leading members of the US Senate Foreign Relations committee wrote to Bush this week urging him to broaden the role of the UN in an attempt to get a "genuine international effort" in postwar Iraq, including more troops and police from other countries.

"We're in a catch-22 moment," said Rick Barton, from the US Centre for Strategic and International Studies, who recently helped write an independent report for the Pentagon on postwar Iraq. "We're really at that very delicate point where the more security presence we have, the less secure things are."

His report warned the Pentagon it had until September to turn around the security crisis in Iraq. "We've really got to engage the Iraqis and hope they will expand their ownership. And it's not really just the Iraqi police or reconstituted Iraqi military; it's got to be the Iraqi body politic," he told the Herald.

Barton eerily echoes de Mello's last report to UN Security Council. "[Iraqis] want to see themselves back at the helm of their country," de Mello warned four weeks before his brutal death, "They also want to see the arrival of security and of the rule and law."

After the bitter divisions in the Security Council over the war in Iraq, the White House insisted that the UN role should be severely limited, giving it no power in the political transition. This made de Mello's job "a difficult balancing act", as he put it.

Postwar Iraq is effectively run by the small US-led Coalition Provisional Authority headed Paul Bremer and dominated by Americans, Britons and a few Australians. The military occupation force also remains dominated by US and British troops with limited support from a host of small US allies.

Both de Mello and the UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan, made strenuous efforts to work with the coalition and supported the hand-picked Iraqi Governing Council appointed by Bremer, even though it is dominated by US-backed exiles. The targeting of the UN and the killing of de Mello are reopening the question of how much the UN can support the US strategy in Iraq.

THE back-to-back bombings in Baghdad and Jerusalem have shaken the aura of confident certainty that surrounded Bush. The cracks in Washington are having a ripple effect.

In New York, simmering tensions at the UN over Iraq and the Middle East erupted. In an extraordinary outburst, the Israeli ambassador to the UN attacked Syria, which is this month's acting president of the UN Security Council. He accused Syria of sponsoring terrorist attacks in Jerusalem and possibly complicity in the Baghdad bombing.

"Syria [is] the country from which most probably the truck that blew up the UN compound in Baghdad came," the clearly furious ambassador, Dan Gillerman, told UN reporters in New York. "Syria - the perpetrator, the harbourer and the headquarters of Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and countless other terror organisations - is with one hand drafting a presidential statement condemning the bombing in Iraq and with the other hand drafting instructions to terrorist organisations to carry out horrible bombings and suicide mission such as the one that was carried in Jerusalem."

At UN headquarters in New York, the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, tried to assure both the UN and the US public that Bush would not shift policy either on Iraq or the Middle East road map.

"The end of the road map is a cliff that both sides will fall off," he said, "so we have to understand the consequences of the end of the road map."

But at the same time, the Israelis were launching a retaliatory attack on Hamas. "Unfortunately at the moment the only road we see is a road in Jerusalem with the bodies of little babies and children," said Gillerman.

Inside the Security Council, the US strategy in Iraq was also under fire from Russia, Germany and France. Bush had sent Powell to New York looking for a new UN resolution that would encourage its allies to send more troops to Iraq. But the French ambassador, Michel Duclos, said bluntly it was time for the US to rethink its occupation and hand over to the UN. The US would not get more international troops in Iraq without giving up some political power.

"Iraq, unfortunately, has become a theatre of operations for terrorists," said Duclos. "To emerge from this trap laid for us by the terrorists, we must give back to the Iraqis their responsibility and their sovereignty." Only the UN, he said pointedly, had the legitimacy, the impartiality and the expertise to do this.

Until now, Bush has stood firmly against the Security Council and his congressional opponents on Iraq. Immediately after the Baghdad bombing he insisted that "Iraq is on an irreversible course towards self-government and peace and America and our friends in the United Nations will stand with the Iraqi people as they reclaim their nation and their future".

For Bush, handing over power in Iraq to the UN would be a stunning backdown. It would also give control over his most important foreign-policy crisis to a body he does not trust.

But as next year's presidential election gets closer, Bush is acutely aware that if Iraq remains a terrorist battleground, not only will its future be at stake, so will his own.